docs(claude): fix stale branch-target guidance in ship-a-feature-branch

[davion-knight]

what changed

CLAUDE.md's "ship a feature branch" section instructed fetching and branching off origin/main. CONTRIBUTING.md's current policy is to base feature branches on test and target test in the PR — main is reserved for docs-only changes, promoted from test by the maintainer.

why

CLAUDE.md's branch instructions were written 2026-06-16, before CONTRIBUTING.md's test-branch policy was introduced on 2026-07-06, and were never updated to match. Since CLAUDE.md is read automatically by Claude Code (and similar coding agents) working on this repo, any agent following it verbatim opens a PR against the wrong base branch. Wrong base branch is this repo's single most common reason a PR gets auto-closed even after a favorable review — worth fixing at the source.

validation

docs-only change, no code touched. reviewed the diff for accuracy against the current CONTRIBUTING.md wording.

Summary by CodeRabbit

• Documentation
  • Updated the feature-branch workflow to use test as the base branch instead of main.
  • Revised the example commands to fetch and branch from origin/test.
  • Clarified that test is the integration branch, while keeping the separate note for docs-only branches from main.

[coderabbitai]

No actionable comments were generated in the recent review. 🎉

ℹ️ Recent review info

⚙️ Run configuration

Configuration used: defaults

Review profile: CHILL

Plan: Pro Plus

Run ID: 78b8dfe1-bb99-4c14-8d4a-89b51d930ed6

📥 Commits

Reviewing files that changed from the base of the PR and between 5c98a3a and ca5cf36.

📒 Files selected for processing (1)

• CLAUDE.md

---

📝 Walkthrough

Walkthrough

The pull request updates CLAUDE.md's "Ship a feature branch" instructions, changing the git fetch and switch commands to base new feature branches on origin/test instead of origin/main, with an accompanying note distinguishing integration branching from docs-only branching off main.

Changes

Documentation update

Layer / File(s)	Summary
Branch base instructions CLAUDE.md	Feature branch workflow commands updated to fetch and switch from origin/test instead of origin/main, with clarifying note on branching conventions.

Estimated code review effort: 1 (Trivial) | ~2 minutes

🚥 Pre-merge checks | ✅ 5

✅ Passed checks (5 passed)

Check name	Status	Explanation
Description Check	✅ Passed	Check skipped - CodeRabbit’s high-level summary is enabled.
Title check	✅ Passed	The title clearly matches the docs-only update that fixes stale ship-a-feature-branch guidance.
Docstring Coverage	✅ Passed	No functions found in the changed files to evaluate docstring coverage. Skipping docstring coverage check.
Linked Issues check	✅ Passed	Check skipped because no linked issues were found for this pull request.
Out of Scope Changes check	✅ Passed	Check skipped because no linked issues were found for this pull request.

✨ Finishing Touches

🧪 Generate unit tests (beta)

• Create PR with unit tests

---

Thanks for using CodeRabbit! It's free for OSS, and your support helps us grow. If you like it, consider giving us a shout-out.

❤️ Share

• X
• Mastodon
• Reddit
• LinkedIn

_{Comment @coderabbitai help to get the list of available commands.}